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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Grazie mille!

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Making Processed Food LOOK More Natural

These days, “natural” food is
cropping up everywhere. Some of it actually is natural
and some of it is just lipstick on a pig – almost literally.

The
purveyors of processed food products are pretty adept at riding the
latest waves of popularity and there's little doubt that “natural”
is at the crest of the current wave. But when average consumers look
at a package of, let's say, sandwich meat in the grocery store and
see perfectly round, perfectly thin slices of ham or beef or chicken
or turkey all neatly and uniformly stacked in shrink-wrapped plastic
packages, they're not thinking, “Oh! That looks natural.”
Once
upon a time, “modern” shoppers wanted food
that looked “modern.”They
liked the uniformity,
because it said “this is neat and clean and perfect.” But the new
“modern” shopper eschews the obviously processed and wants things
a little more rustic, a little less formed and molded, a little more
“natural.” And so the food processors have set out to give the
customer what he or she wants: food that looks natural.
Not that it's any less processed or any more “natural” than it
was before, but, by golly, it sure looks that
way.In
fact, Kraft Foods -- the company behind Oscar
Mayer products – has spent years
of time and tons of money developing – get this – specialized
equipment designed to make processed food look natural by cutting it
unevenly. They've got whole teams of people analyzing the way dads
hack up turkeys at Thanksgiving and then creating machines to
replicate that hacking in order to produce a more “natural” look.
They even paint the edges of the slices with caramel coloring to make
them look more like something that was carved right off a freshly
roasted bird. Never mind that certain caramel colorings were recently
determined to be carcinogenic. They just look so
darn natural!They
say you eat with your eyes. I tried that and found it extremely
messy. I prefer to eat with my

The
point I'm belaboring is this; don't be taken in by buzzwords and
marketing ploys. Currently, neither the FDA or the USDA has any rules
regarding the use of the word “natural” in food labeling,
although the FDA does actively discourage it. But there are no legal
standards – or legal consequences – so manufacturers can slap the
word on anything their greedy, market-driven little hearts desire.
And since they know that the American sheeple are flocking to
“natural” things these days, they're gonna do their darnedest to
fleece them by any means necessary, including engineering processed
food to look more “natural.”If you
are cooking at home with fresh, wholesome ingredients that you
prepared yourself, then by all means make it look as good and as
appetizing and as tantalizing as possible so that people will,
indeed, enjoy the sight and eat with their eyes. But when it comes to
prepackaged processed food products, don't let your eyes deceive you.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)